


In Restless Dreams I Walk Alone

by SegaBarrett



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 11:39:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skyler tries to figure it all out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Restless Dreams I Walk Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [icedteainthebag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icedteainthebag/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Breaking Bad and I make no money from this. 
> 
> A/N: Title is from "Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel.

All of that time Walt had worked in the car wash, Skyler had never thought that it would be her sanctuary. Her safe haven. The one place that Walt so very rarely came. It was as if he’d brushed off that idea – her idea, and the right one, too, she still insisted to herself – and so it didn’t even exist. Wasn’t even a factor, because Heisenberg was never wrong. And these days Walt had checked out and Heisenberg had come to stay.

She paced the office and eventually took a seat, then turned her nervous energy to balancing a pen, to bouncing it against the desk. 

Running the car wash. She never thought that would be her new job; for so long she’d dreamed of success – not fame, not acclaim or anything like that – from her stories, but now that was a fading memory. She could never do that now, never get on anybody’s radar because they would find out. They’d find out. They would start looking deeper, maybe a devoted fan or maybe one of those crazy stalker men who would want to hunt Skyler down for hell knows what reasons to abduct her and make her his bride or something.  
Then again, would that be all that much worse than the man she currently had in her bed? She shivered as she remembered the way he’d touched her, ignoring the way she’d tensed up, the realization that she couldn’t stop him. That he would just keep going and all she could do was submit.

There had to be options other than that one, though. Well, she had tried them. She had gotten the kids away, gotten them safe – that was one victory, at least. She wanted to get away. Wanted, needed to flee Walt and all of the poison he brought with him. But she was in it now, too. She had blood on her hands, too.

She stood up and began to pace again.

There had to be some answer. Some hidden one that she just hadn’t thought up yet. In college when she had read all of those stories, there had always been an epiphany, a realization, a point where everything became clear. Like in those James Joyce short stories. A turn. 

In this case, a fix. Something that had been shown in the “previously on” reels because all the viewers had forgotten about it until now.

But this was real life. Maybe there just weren’t any answers to be found.

***

Skyler locked up for the day, shrugged off the safety of the car wash but wasn’t yet ready to return to that uncertainty, that suffocation in her home – his home – their home?  
She considered her options. Perhaps she could kill some time – somewhere. It wasn’t as if Walt would expect her home at any particular time. As long as she was “his” in that possessive sense, one of his trophies, his things, she was sure he didn’t really care.

How had it gotten to this point? Her mind couldn’t quite wrap around it.

She turned a corner instead of heading to her car. There was a bar there, a sort of classy-looking one judging from the outside, at least. She opened the door, stepped up the first few stairs and stopped. It was as if she could hear her shoes click in echo as she stood and stared. Seated at a booth, nursing a drink, was Jesse Pinkman. He was slouched against the seat-back, staring at his cell phone like it had some kind of answer in it, some sort of message.

Skyler continued in her walked. Damned if she would let Walt’s illicit activities spread into everything that surrounded her. Damned if she would turn tail and run. That had never been her.

She glided along the marble floor and she pictured it as if it were that restaurant she’d waited tables at so long ago. The one where she’d met Walt. The one where she had first smiled at the sweet older man who she didn’t really like that way at first but whose attention she found compelling. She’d been a college girl, trying to forge out on her own after a disastrous childhood and adolescence. The mother that had always tried to pit she and Marie against each other and the father who had never been pleased and had always wanted a son instead, someone he could teach the family business and how to be a man and how to hunt and shoot.

He hadn’t realized that Skyler would have gladly learned to hunt and shoot, could hold her own, had picked up on all the lessons he didn’t want to bother teaching her.  
She and Walt, they’d started seeing each other, a drink here, a dinner there, movies and chats and talking on the phone and then the kissing, the caressing in Walt’s apartment, the little efficiency with textbooks stacked in every corner like Walt spent all of his free time focusing on how he was going to _be_ something, _become_ someone great, get his name put in with all of those great men of chemistry.

And then the fatigue and morning sickness and realization that it had become more serious without her realizing it. She couldn’t turn tail and run – would never turn tail and run back home, listening to her mother call her a failure and a slut and a whore, so it was a weeding ring and a quick wedding instead.

She didn’t regret it then. The future still looked bright and so what if it was all a little out of order? Somewhere, not in the kissing and caressing and showing off, but in the planning, the putting money aside and house shopping, she’d fallen in love with Walter White.

Just as she’d fallen out of love – had she really? – when the structure had all fallen apart like a Jenga tower and the mask had peeled off like Walt was at some goddamned spa and she’d been admiring that green shit for all of these years.

She walked. Jesse was lost in whatever thoughts he was having. Whatever the hell those were, even. 

She could have glided by. Maybe he wouldn’t have even noticed. But that would be another way of running, wouldn’t it?

She tapped him on his shoulder, and he turned and looked up, dropped his phone on the table with a clash.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Uh… Mrs. White, hey,” he stretched out the last word, like he was trying desperately to make it sound natural.

“How’s it going?” she inquired dryly. “Is this seat taken?”

“Uh, no,” he replied, before looking around. “Sup, Mrs. White? What can I … uh… do for you? You want me to buy you a drink? ‘Cause I can… Uh…”

“Sure,” Skyler cut in. “Go get me a Cosmo.” Jesse scurried up, trying to pick up his phone but dropping it on the floor in the process. The battery popped out and Skyler scooped it up, putting it back in and powering it up. The background was a picture of a dark-haired girl – Mexican, by the looks of her – and a little boy. Jesse looked from Skyler then back to the bar. “The Cosmo, Jesse.” He scampered – there really was not a lick of grace to him – to the bar. As he stood there and ordered, Skyler considered the background. His kid? Not a chance. Jesse was what, twenty-five? Not that nineteen was that young to be a father, but this… this had to be one of those ready-made family deals. Jesse had to be the valiant prince coming in to save this girl where her ex had failed. How quaint, how sweet in a way, that life still worked that way for him. She sure as hell wasn’t going to be some stand-in mother for Ted’s kids if that trainwreck had actually materialized into anything.

 _Ted._ She was not going to think about that. She’d done what she had to do and the fact that she drank, that she couldn’t sleep… the fact that Walt was stone sober and slept just fine…

Jesse came back to the table holding the Cosmo, and Skyler was surprised that he managed to not drop that as well. He slid it across the table to her and she picked it up, nodded thanks, and took a long drink.

There was something to that warm feeling, like it was breaking down particles of guilt, dissolving them little by little, not erasing them but whittling them down so they would fit… where? Somewhere. Anywhere.

“So, hey,” Jesse broke into the silence. “How, uh, are you? You okay?”

She laughed bitterly, in between drinks. She wondered how much more nervous she could make him. Maybe if she came on to him – oh! The world’s greatest “screw you” to Walt, if she decimated Jesse’s respect for him by seducing him. Can’t really respect a man whose own wife doesn’t want to sleep in his bed and is only there out of fear, out of knowing he’d killed a man, maybe more than that. And if he snapped her neck and maybe Jesse’s too? Maybe that was worth the satisfaction of proving she wouldn’t be bought.  
She pictured it – how would it go? Something like Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. She’d have on stockings, maybe, and Jesse wouldn’t be able to resist. She would teach him the ways, the places, guide him and she’d feel him inside her, and it wouldn’t be like Walt these days, not that passionless fake care that should have just been manhandling for the message that was behind it, that he could kill her as easily as fuck her.

She told Jesse to go buy her another drink. _Walt’s pet._

She downed this one, too, and let her mind wander to Jesse again, the thought of his skinny body atop hers. It was laughable, really.

After four Jesse-purchased Cosmos, he looked at her, clicking his tongue once before venturing, “I’ll drive you home.”

He led her, his arm hooked in hers like he was escorting her to some dance or some goddamned debutante ball. They were partners in Walt’s ridiculous dance.

He pulled up in front of her house. The lights were off – Walt was either way, hard at work – heh – or sleeping.

Jesse popped open the door.

“You gonna be okay, Mrs. White?” he asked, brow creased in concern.

“I’m fine,” she slurred. This was getting stupid. She lingered a moment and let her life flash before her eyes. All those books she’d read in college. Benito Cereno, Self-Reliance, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

“The caged bird quit singing,” she turned and told Jesse, “Walt snapped its little yellow neck.”

Jesse stared at her. _He must not understand metaphor, at least from a drunk woman._

“I’m fine,” she repeated, moving to step out. The world was spinning. Not all that unusual as of late.

She figured she wouldn’t be able to undertake a Graduate plan after all.

She hummed “Scarborough Fair” as she walked towards the house. She noticed dispassionately that it had begun to rain.

She was a caged bird. A yellow bird. One that would bite her handler if she could.

She just had to bide her time.

The End


End file.
